Friday, September 8, 2017

Weekend Design Challenge 090817

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

Choose a mechanic from each of two different recent blocks—Ixalan, Amonkhet, Kaladesh, or Shadows over Innistrad—and combine them on a single card. Tell me about the product it belongs to.

11 comments:

Ramunap DigLand - Desert (C)T, add a excavate counter to Ramunap Dig: Add R to your mana pool.When Ramunap Dig has three or more excavate counters on it, exile it and then return it to the battlefield transformed. ---Glyph of the Fervent Artifact 2R, T, discard a card: Glyph of the Fervent deals 2 damage to target opponent.

I love the idea that destroying 'modern' / prosperous Amonkhet means that we can return to 'ancient' / archaeological Amonkhet.

Here we're combining Amonkhet's brick counters (and deserts) with Ixalan's transform-into-land mechanic to create something thematically whole and unique: We are digging out a desert to uncover an artifact of past eras beneath it. (And I have to point out that the people fleeing the Luxa River might be the ones uncovering other cities that used to exist elsewhere on their plane.)

We might want to make the transform optional so it doesn't mana screw players, and we probably want to start with three counters and remove them like Sunset Pyramid does.

Lashweed Tracker GUCreature - Human Scout (U)Skulk (This creature can't be blocked by creatures with greater power.)Whenever CARDNAME deals combat damage to an opponent, it explores. (Reveal the top card of your library. Put that card into your hand if it's a land. Otherwise, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature, then put the card back on top or into your graveyard.)1/2

I think it would fit better into SOI since the repeated explore triggers would synergize reasonably well with graveyard/delirium strategies.

It's a bold move to bring back one of the most underwhelming mechanics in the last couple years. SOI's skulk does indeed interact on this card with Ixalan's explore mechanic: At first making the Tracker evasive so that you can enjoy your attack trigger, and then, as it grows larger, becoming less evasive and exploring less frequently.

Outside that context, the latter half is the wrong kind of interaction: one mechanic making the other less relevant. Within that context it acts as a safety valve to prevent this two-mana card from growing too big (It doesn't prevent you from netting you too many lands because finding a land doesn't reduce your ability to skulk), although +1/+1 or +2/+2 is also an evasion mechanic.

I can get behind this card, but I have trouble imagining a whole set that can justify further use of skulk, especially considering how SOI barely did.

Cycling will definitely be back in the future. We haven't played with enrage yet, but interacting with combat damage as well as incidental damage effects seems pretty solid; Provided there's significant design space there, it's not hard to see it coming back. While enrage won't fit everywhere, cycling nearly does. The two don't particular synergize.

This is a pretty sideways way to say "rummage once for free, more for 2 each." If this weren't rare, I'd insist that just Enrage-Rummage was perfectly sufficient. Since enrage is something you can trigger many times (even in the same turn), that makes me want to atomize the effect even more.

This card rewards you for making artifact tokens with more of them. When you don't have any, this will be pretty tame (treasure tokens are pretty powerful, actually). When you do, it'll be absurd. Casting it twice in a row should be consistently bonkers when you're not busy dying to creatures. That's an awful lot of variance, but for a Commander product, not too much.

Search This Blog

About Us

We met as competitors and collaborators in the second Great Designer Search. After the contest was over, we decided we still had things to say about designing Magic: the Gathering. So we started a blog.